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This app will add up all your Uber and Lyft rides, if you dare

This app will add up all your Uber and Lyft rides, if you dare

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Pistats.io scans your email to tally up your ride-share costs

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There are some things I’d prefer never to find out. For example, I’d be content through life not knowing how much I’ve spent on late night pizza, how much time I’ve wasted watching cat videos, or the total number of calories I consumed at Chipotle today. Another thing I'd add to that list is how much time and money I’ve spent in a stranger’s car through Uber or Lyft.

If you’re bold enough to find out, then Pistats.io is the app for you. By allowing the free web app access to your email that’s linked to your Uber or Lyft account, it sifts through your electronic receipts and tallies up your information for you, visualizing your ridesharing data to give you the insight you probably don’t want.

Once you grant the app access to your email (only Gmail is supported at this time), the app takes a few seconds to find and total your receipts. But before you allow the app access to your email, you might want to consider the risks. In the era where almost everything you do turns into a data point, Pistats.io serves as a reminder that your personal information and habits are as easily obtainable as getting access to your email account. Giving Google Chrome or Airbnb access to your account's basic information is one thing, but allowing an unknown website access to all your email is something you might want to think about. Reading the website's privacy policy acknowledges that your ride-share data will indeed be shared with "partners and advertisers" albeit anonymously.

Allowing an unknown website access to all your email is something you might want to think about

For the sake of journalism, I granted the app access to my email and it counted 58 rides from me. It also visualized my ride-sharing by time of day as well as spending by hour. It gets even more granular with the interactive map that plotted my exact pick-up and drop-off locations. My results showed that I had taken rides in four cities since July of last year totaling $876.60 for traveling 265 miles and taking more than 15 hours — all because I didn’t want to take public transportation.

With the money I spent on Uber and Lyft, I could have bought a new bike or saved up for a Segway. And at an average of $3.30 per mile traveled, it would have been cheaper to take a taxi — or buy a gallon of gasoline and begged someone at the gas station to drive me to my destination. The shame is real.

Now please, dear internet, do not create an app like this that tallies how much I spend on Seamless.